


Kiss Me Quick

by kmo



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Angst, Cannibalism, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Death(s), Drug Use, F/M, Not Bedelia's for a change, post-313
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-15
Updated: 2016-03-15
Packaged: 2018-05-26 23:10:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6259843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kmo/pseuds/kmo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dinner for two for Bedelia and Hannibal at a table set for three. It doesn't go quite as Hannibal planned.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kiss Me Quick

**Author's Note:**

> My version of the stinger scene--at last! It took me that long to work through all of my stages of grief. 
> 
> Hannibal is definitely experiencing a lot of strong feelings for Will, but Will does not appear in the story, fyi.

The smell of roasted flesh ( _hers_ ) dances beneath Bedelia’s nostrils as the glow of candlelight warms her near-naked breasts. Her eyelids flutter, her vision swims, and it is hard to bring the room, once so familiar, into focus. She can feel the rigid lines of the dining chair against her back and the itch of lace against her shoulders but nothing at all beneath the waist. Her hands rest numb and useless in her lap.

The scene before her feels three times removed, like she’s watching a home movie of someone else on old Super 8 film, the kind her father had taken of her as a girl. Daddy’s been dead for years, but Bedelia feels him closer now than ever before, standing sentinel over her shoulder. She’s ashamed for him to see her like this. She is here for the feast and she is _for_ the feast. The singsong truth of it repeats itself over in her head in perfect Gertrude Stein simplicity.

She doesn’t know whether this is a hell Hannibal has made for her or if it is one that her own fractured psyche, marinating in madness, has made for itself. Bedelia sees the shade of her father flicker out of the corner of her eye. If he’s not there to protect her, he must be there to escort her behind that _other_ veil, the one with no return-ticket. Her heart longs to go with him—part of her would follow him gladly if she were capable of following at all.

 _You can survive this_. Her father’s voice speaks within her own head yet echoes throughout the room. His words for everything from a scraped knee to his own early death.

 _Thank you, Daddy_. There will be a time for trauma and horror when she survives. But not today.

Trembling, Bedelia’s hand traverses the table to pluck an oyster fork from its bone china plate. Her remaining limbs feel like they are made of molasses and her arm moves as if the air was made of sludge. The simple action takes an eternity; the distance from the plate to her lap feels nearly transatlantic. But she manages to fold the fork safely inside her white cloth napkin. Slowly, she presses the sharp tine of the fork against the round pad of her thumb, unable to control the beatific smile that crosses her face at the sight of her own blood. She reclines languidly against her chair and waits. Every heartbeat spans an hour.

Hannibal soon returns with a small silver trolley piled high with side dishes, wine, and tropical fruits. He bustles and preens as he sets the table, the most exquisite host, more pleased with himself than she’s ever seen. He’s selected a dinner jacket in patterned silk jacquard that complements her gown, the color of the deep blue sea. She’d like to say it was the color of her eyes, but, no, it matches another’s. Someday, perhaps, that knowledge will sting, but the cocktail of sedatives and painkillers that keeps her docile and pliant also keeps her heart packed in cotton, insulated from petty emotions like anger and jealousy. Her world has narrowed to the sharp silver fork in her lap and the tiny vein in Hannibal’s throat.

(She is not nearly as out of it as she appears. Bedelia developed a penchant for hypnotics after Florence, discovering the only place she could truly escape Hannibal was at the end of a needle. She indulged very rarely—Christian holidays and her birthday. It seems she has built up a certain toleration, but best not to let Hannibal _see_.)

“Poi, of course,” Hannibal says, laying a crystal dish of wobbling purple-grey jelly on the table. “While it has no taste of its own, its smooth texture and starch pair well with that of the roasted pork. We also have wine. Champagne to start—it’s a special occasion after all. I take it you’ll have some?” he asks, near-guilelessly.

“Please,” Bedelia says, making a half-hearted gesture toward her own glass, itching for him to come closer.

Hannibal loosens the cork with a pop and deftly fills two flutes to the brim with bubbling gold. She keeps her eyes on his throat the entire time, watching the blood pulse in his neck, nearly mesmerized. Nick the jugular and the carotid artery and death is inevitable within a minute, unconsciousness in less than that. She may be high as a proverbial kite but medical school is burned in bone deep.

He sets the glass within arm’s reach and all too quickly dances away. Bedelia gasps audibly in disappointment, but Hannibal is too lost in self-congratulation to notice.

He continues on with his self-satisfied narration, showing off before her. She has always been his favorite captive audience. “I am sure it will not escape your notice that the lava rocks and chips of ice are evocative of the ninth circle of Dante’s _Inferno_ , the circle reserved for the punishment of traitors. The place where the devil dwells is not hot, but cold, because it is farthest from God’s love.” He picks up a large fork and long sharp knife, carving thick slices from the roast, thick slices of _her_.

“Contrapasso,” Bedelia says. Conscious thought is a labor, but her neurons are still firing, even at substandard speed. “I walked away from you too many times and now I’ll never walk at all.”

He smiles back at her, pleased, but does not deign to explain himself. “Will you be having the pork tonight or would you prefer your oysters?”

Bedelia licks her lips and tightens her grip on her fork; she must distract him. “I confess, you’ve made me very curious about the way I taste.”

His smile broadens and his eyes twinkle, sparkling like the sequins of her spangled gown. He picks up his knife and carves two generous slices, artfully dressing them with poi and fruit.

“Hannibal?” Bedelia asks, her voice slow and patchy—it’s like listening to herself being broadcast from Mars. “Which of us is farthest from love right now?”

“Hmm?” He cocks his head in a look of mild condescension, humoring a madwoman. If she could feel feelings, she’d be insulted.

“Is this my hell…or is it yours?”

“This is my design for you, Bedelia.” The candlelight flickers around his face, hellfire leaping up from the pit.

“You’ve set the table for three, but only two of us are here. Are we waiting for someone—Will Graham, perhaps?” she asks, every syllable dripping with poison. “It seems rude to start without him.”

Hannibal turns his face away from her, but even through her drug-filled daze Bedelia knows she has hit her mark. “Will Graham will not be joining us this evening.”

“Because he did not survive your little Lovers’ Leap into the Atlantic. So, you have come here,” Bedelia savors the words, they taste heady and smooth in her mouth, like a very good pour of Macallan, “to…eat your feelings…with me.”

Hannibal nods at her, his glance half-mischief and half-murder. “You’ve been holding that one in for awhile. How lovely to see you without your person-suit at last, Bedelia, sedatives and fear having loosened your tongue.” He sets the plate before her and hovers by her side, frustratingly beyond the reach of her short arms. “Perhaps you should have worked harder with me to overcome my emotional eating.”

He’s not wrong, she says the things she’s wanted to say for years, that she would have said in Florence, that she may never have the chance to say again. “So you will eat me, piece by piece, to smother the pain in your hungry heart. As you ate Mischa. As you nearly ate Will. But in the end, I will be dead, another ghost haunting your memory palace, and you will still be in pain.” She pauses to deliver the _coup de grace_. “And more alone than ever.”

Hannibal flexes his hands and smooths back his perfectly pomaded hair, showing the lines of his skull. For a moment Bedelia believes she may have hastened her end. But then instead of snapping her neck he slinks away from her to fill their water glasses.

“The presentation also reminds me of the rivalry between the Hawaiian goddess Pele and her sister Poli’ahu, the snow-goddess. Are you familiar with Hawaiian mythology?” They’ve come to the Miss America Talent Show portion of the evening where Hannibal prattles on in his perfect dinner party patter. Once again, he takes refuge in his person-suit, refusing to let her see him in this most vulnerable moment. “In the legend, Pele and Poli’ahu are locked into an eternal struggle. Pele brings forth heat and lava from her home in Kilauea and Poli’ahu spreads her blanket of snow over the mountain peaks, cooling the lava flows until they battle again. The myth casts fire and ice as two opposing and equally matched forces in the dance of creation.”

Bedelia would be challenged to unpack such an elaborate metaphor even if she wasn’t drugged to the gills—she has no idea which of them is Pele or Poli’ahu today, and frankly she doesn’t care. Her only concern is plunging her fork into the soft flesh of Hannibal’s throat and the other end of the table might as well be in Honolulu.

Hannibal has seated himself opposite her and is about to drape his dinner napkin across his lap when Bedelia impulsively, breathlessly says, “Kiss me, Hardy. Kiss me quick.”

Her words arrest him and he pauses with the inhuman stillness of a shark lurking in the deep. “Admiral Nelson,” he says, catching hold of the allusion. “But it’s hardly the time for last words, Bedelia. I have a very long goodbye planned for us.”

Nine recipes’ worth, she knows, one for every Christmas, Easter, and birthday for the past three years. She can recite them all by name: Blood Orange Glazed Breast of Pheasant and Maryland She-Crab Bisque; Lamb Chops with Mint Jelly and Lithuanian Poppy Seed Cake. “Please,” she begs, voice warbling, “kiss me. Just one more time. I..I..need this…I just need…” she trails off, unable to finish. The tears in her eyes are no half-truth.

Slowly, without taking his eyes off her, Hannibal sets aside his napkin and rises from the table. He creeps deliberately toward her; his footfalls are soft on the carpet but toll like a death knell in her skull. Pausing at her elbow, he asks, “What do you need, Bedelia?”

She turns to face him and his eyes are black-hole dark, his expression profoundly sad. It is hard to hold his gaze, it is hard to focus on anything for more than a second at time when each second lasts forever. She squeezes the cold silver fork in her lap, reassuring herself that it’s still there. “I need to know…that you loved me once…for myself.” She blinks and a tear slips down her face, mingling with the steam rising from her own roasted flesh. “And not just for meat.”

Hannibal brushes back a lock of hair from her face. “You would not let me love you. Not the way I wanted to.” There is no malice in his voice, just disappointment. They speak like a couple long divorced, and in a way they are. “Will did.”

A sharp retort threatens to bubble up and escape from Bedelia’s mouth but she presses her lips together and swallows it whole. She turns to him again, eyes all wet and dark and blue; “Kiss me,” she demands, a heroine begging the favor of a demon, hoping the third time will be the charm.

He smiles a little, like he is indulging a child. He’s never been able to refuse her anything she asked of him, so badly does he need to be needed by her. His fingertips caress her cheekbones, her proud chin, the sharp blades of her shoulders and his eyes follow the path of his hands, smoldering. “You have never been more beautiful in my eyes than in this very moment.” Of course he would think that; she finally bears his mark upon her skin. His palm cups her full breast through the thin fabric, his thumbnail teasing her nipple as it becomes erect. Bedelia gasps as her own body, high on hypnotics and heaven only knows what else, betrays her.

Hannibal withdraws his hand, leaving her breast feeling cold. She pleads with him with her eyes, desperately needing him to stay. And then in a reality-warping second, power crackling between them, she draws him to her, a siren to a hapless sailor, as he bends to kiss her, hands tangling in her hair. Their lips brush chastely, but Bedelia wills him closer, moaning, her left hand grasping his neck just above his collar, feeling for the spot where warm blood rises to the surface of his skin. At the moment when he thrusts his tongue behind her teeth to taste hers, she plunges the oyster fork into his throat with every atom of fragile strength she possesses. Bedelia stabs over and over and over into his flesh, grinning maniacally when she’s baptized by that first spray of arterial blood.

There’s red everywhere. So much red. On her chin, in her hair, staining the lace décolletage of her gown and pooling on her dinner plate, a gruesome gravy. Hannibal staggers back from her, stunned, hand grasping at his ravaged throat, blood pulsing between his fingers. She’s never seen him look so surprised. Is that the expression he wore when Will Graham pushed him off a cliff?

She tells him what they both know. “I’ve punctured your windpipe, your jugular, and your carotid artery, Hannibal. Death in sixty seconds, give or take.” The longest minute of both their lives.

He sinks to his knees before her, still gasping blood and air. Through it all, he still manages a shit-eating grin. “This is all I ever wanted for you, Bedelia,” he says, his voice a reedy gurgle.

The drugs have a surreal way of bringing the threshold of revelation closer and she grasps his gossamer-thin hint. “Will Graham couldn’t live with you…and you decided you won’t live without him.” Things have a way of happening because Hannibal wants them to happen, even this.

He’s on the floor now, his pale face growing paler as his brain is deprived of blood and oxygen. How fitting that he who consumed so many should die choking on himself. His eyes flick toward the roast on the table as he manages to gasp out one last word. “Taste,” he tempts her.

Bedelia’s hand, still clutching the blood-stained oyster fork, hovers over her plate. She smells herself, rich with honeyed glaze and salt and spices. Her mouth waters; she’s curious. She sets aside the fork and summons the will to deny him one last time. Looking Hannibal squarely in the eye, she licks his blood from her fingers one by one. “Delicious,” she pronounces.

Hannibal’s eyes flutter closed and he dies with a smile on his lips, amused at the sight of Bedelia devouring him.

Bedelia slumps against the back of her chair in post-coital bliss, the tension having left her body at the same moment life left Hannibal’s. Daddy’s ghost has returned behind the veil, perhaps he took Hannibal with him. Bedelia sits alone at the head of the table, the sole hostess of a macabre feast, the lone player left onstage in the last act of a tragedy.

She raises her flute of champagne. Blood has mingled with the wine, turning it a cloudy rosé. _Something pink_. 

“To absent friends,” she toasts to the now empty room.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is shamelessly inspired by the interpretation of the Nelson quote in _Code Name Verity_.
> 
> Hannibal misinterprets the Hawaiian myth slightly. Hawaiians believe that Poli'ahu wins every battle no matter how fearsome Pele is. Her snows turn to water which make the island fertile. Bedelia is definitely the snow-goddess of this story.


End file.
